From the larger sailing vessels which plied the longer star routes, the Exile and Expatriate and Expulsion, and Exclusion, had come populations from the worlds of older stars, from the Vital Delectation of 47 Ursae Majoris; from Cat Sin of 61 Ursae Majoris; the Land of Hungry Needle-Necked Wraiths of Alpha Mensae, and her daughter, the fair and deadly World of Willows and Flowers. From these older worlds came men of earlier ships, Delectable and Cat, Wraith and Overlord, which had ancient roots in the precursor races of Nymph and Chimera, Witch and Vampire.

The men of the earlier ships, Exiles and Expatriates, the Excluded and the Expelled, brought with them antique languages and laws, beliefs and bloodlines, whose traces were still to be found in odd corners of Torment. Time had swept the rest away.

Only the Errant, in whose blood-mechanisms many Swanlike quirks from the lawless planet Dust of 12 Ophiuchi still lingered, maintained a separate identity from the other Esne, quaint forms of dress and address, and special dietary rules. The Errant stood aside from the other lower orders during the last sixteen hundred years of history.

They denied the legitimacy of all the new physiopsychological sumptuary laws imposed by Princess Rania and held to antique charters granting them the right to carry weapons, and vote for their officers, and to own their own miserable plots of sand and snow and worthless waste-scrub outside the terraforming superstructure. They celebrated no feasts of thanksgiving to the Master of All Worlds, nor saluted when Tau Ceti rose in the East, but saluted only 61 Cygni; nor did they ever recite the words of fealty to Triumvirate.

The Errant had odd, impious, and even vile ideas about the nature of the soul of Rania, saying she had lost some undefined divine essence while she tarried among the inhuman stars. It was not so much that they maintained a proud separation from the customs of Wanderers and Wayfarers and Itinerants, than that they were excluded and abused by more decently minded folk.

This was because they prided themselves on having escorted the Judge of Ages across the stars. He went raving mad in Year 30 Ultravindication and fled aboard the Errantry from Sol to 70 Ophiuchi, thence to Xi Boötis and 44 Boötis, sailing finally to Iota Draconis, arriving in Torment in Year 600. Rumor said he dwelled somewhere in hiding on or under the world, brooding and cursing and thinking strange thoughts.

4. The Crest of the Strangers

Despite that Torment was an entire world, large and convoluted as any, there simply were not so many possible places or races from which the woman at the door might come.

She was not a Pilgrim, since they did not let their women out of concealment unescorted. Neither would a Meanderer nor a Nomad have a right to step into this House, which, according to a very ancient law, was sacrosanct: the Stranger House was as much a part of the starship Stranger as if the chambers were within her now far-distant hull. Certain upper ranks among the Ostracized, a panderer or shaman or quartermaster, might be allowed under special circumstances: but they did not like their womenfolk to go alone among Strangers. An Esne would enter by the menial door. An Esne of the Errant line would make a point of it, for they had a high pride of their low humility.

But now Vigil twisted the wand angrily, driving together more tightly the contacts between the power unit and the thinking process. This time, he did not ask but commanded the chamber ghost to answer, in his name, in his father’s name, and in the name of the Table of Stability his father served. Whose fingerprint of what woman had it been who had the right to come here?

Vigil waited, hushing his clamoring internals. But his mind leaped ahead before the ghost answered: this empty dormitory was “Officer’s Country”—so even among his people, only one of highest pedigree would be recognized by the welcome lamp.

Therefore, he was not surprised, not perfectly surprised, when the ghost finally replied. The heraldry showed the finger in the printlock was that of this mother, Patience.

The crest showed quarterly: first, Or and a Chief Sable three escallops of the field; second and third, Fusily argent and gules; fourth, Argent three Roses Gules barbed and seeded proper. Beneath were marks no one alive could decrypt, written in a forgotten icon system, unrelated to Monument codes, called the Roman alphabet, which primordial ages in Eden before the Noösphere once used. The soundline assigned to those marks was one Vigil could understand, and it said: N’Oubliez. Forget not.

But the heraldic air helm (which only those who walk in space may show) loomed not above the crest, nor were the storks of Eden found at their supporting posts to either side. Those storks had frightened and fascinated him as a child, where they loomed on the metal fabric walls of the folding tabernacle of his father’s presence hall, flanking the shield above his judgment seat, beaked and membered in bright red.

The heraldry of Patience Starmandame was displayed on a lozenge rather than an escutcheon, which was the form proper only to a widow.

In such a fashion, that suddenly, did Vigil learn his father was dead.

5. Matriarch of the First Humans

He called upon his mind discipline as he stooped to crank the door open with the manual wheel.

One internal mental organism he unleashed to rage; another he released to simple stark denial, saying over and over that there must be some error, some mischance, which, when explained, would set all things aright; a third internal wept, and Vigil spent more than a moment keeping his eyes and tear ducts out of the command stream from that one.

Each to separate chambers of his many-chambered mind he sent them, that he might later rage, cavil, or mourn in solemn sadness, as was fitting.

For now, while bright and cheerful music still shouted its mirth without, premonitions told him there was no time to grieve. His mother would not have come in such a wise, without her retinue or ladies, if no disaster reared.

When the door was but half-open, a narrow slit, in she slid. For a moment, he thought she was his first-circle sister, Humility.

Mother had used an illegal process from Odile of 61 Cygni, a First Sweep world, to reduce her visible age. His figure was slender, her breasts ripe, and her face was without wrinkle or spot. It was like seeing an old album stereo-image become solid.

As if in defiance of Pilgrim simplicity of dress, she wore a Category Five ancestral bunad, freely composed, a richly embroidered blue bodice, skirt, and apron, over a white chemise, a rainbow-hued sash from which a pocket, or løslomme, hung. Her jacket was red, and the decorated scarf beneath a twelve-tined coronet was white. Gold and silver ornaments glittered at her fingers, ears, and collar, and the patterns of her bodice and skirt depicted the mythical flowers of Eden, the hydrangea and the saxifrage.

She was as fair as an adorned bridal statue in an alabaster road shrine raised by Sacerdotes to adore a virgin world, or as a crystal confirmation memorial submerged by cetaceans shining beneath the lake water.

Vigil turned his face away, ashamed.

Patience said, “My son, naked you came from me, and naked your bottom when I wiped it with recycling tissue.”

Vigil said gruffly, “That is not what shames me. Have you turned to immortalism? It is heresy. The spirits in the Noösphere are timeless. We in the biosphere, we who live and die, return to youth but thrice, at baptism and confirmation and marriage, and no other time.”

Patience said, “It is allowed a final time when a widowed crone weds a youth, for our ancestors in their folly decreed that husbands should be older than their wives. Your father is legally dead.”